Since the golden days of the Four Horsemen in WCW, wrestling promotions have had to contend with wrestlers banding together into factions or stables, usually as villains. And the history of wrestling is full of legendary groups including not just the Horsemen, but the New World Order, D-Generation X, The Bullet Club, the Main Event Mafia, and countless others.
Of course, not every faction goes down in history, even if they seem like they have potential. Some prove to be utter failures, while others crash and burn before they’ve really had a chance to take off. Let’s take a look at 10 of these kinds of groups — from WCW, Impact, and WWE — and talk about why they failed to catch on.
10 Hardy Family Office: Lack of Direction
All Elite Wrestling has boasteds a number of popular stables like The Elite, Blackpool Combat Club, and The Inner Circle, but the Hardy Family Office isn’t anywhere near beloved, despite the leadership of fan-favorite veteran Matt Hardy. It certainly had a promising start, with “Big Money” Matt Hardy playing the role of unscrupulous manager, convincing Private Party into signing predatory contracts. But the HFO soon evolved into a generic heel group of mercenary tag teams like The Butcher & The Blade and The Hybrid2, losing its initial premise.
9 The Radicalz: Booking
Fans unfamiliar with The Radicalz might be surprised to find out that a faction made up of underrated and gifted WCW workers Dean Malenko, Perry Saturn, Chris Benoit, and Eddie Guerrero didn’t exactly set the world on fire in the Attitude Era. All four men jumped ship from WCW at the same time and arrived in WWE as the Radicalz, but the booking immediately killed them as a group. Their initial angle had them failing to fight for WWE contracts, only to be gifted them by Triple H in exchange for an abrupt heel turn, and as a group they often failed to win big matches.
8 Corporate Ministry: The Higher Power
Attitude Era WWE boasted two massive heel factions in the form of evil authority The Corporation and the supernatural The Ministry of Darkness, and in 1999 decided to merge to form The Corporate Ministry. While the idea that the people in charge of WWE are literally evil is solid, the execution left a lot to be desired.
Part of the problem was that The Ministry answered to a mysterious “higher power,” leading to the uninspired revelation that said higher power turned out to be WWE boss Vince McMahon himself. While it sounded fine on paper, in context it didn’t make much sense, and The Corporate Ministry quickly petered out.
7 Nightmare Collective: Context
Currently, AEW’s Nightmare Collective is the lowest rated faction on Cagematch.net, with a dismal score of 0.33 out of 10, ranking below even legendarily reviled groups like The Alliance To End Hulkamania. While Awesome Kong being a monster heel in a burgeoning women’s division is a fine idea that worked well for Impact, AEW fans for some reason really hate Brandi Rhodes, who was managing the group. It was weird that she was a scary heel while her husband Cody was the company’s top babyface, and the group quietly disbanded after Kong stepped away from competing.
6 The New Nexus: Awful Lineup
Before John Cena ruined it, the NXT-focused heel faction Nexus was one of the coolest concepts WWE came up with in a long time, so a New Nexus led by CM Punk held a lot of promise. It even had a better T-shirt than the previous version. Unfortunately, the group suffered from a less-than-stellar lineup that included weak in-ring performers like David Otunga and Mason Ryan, and Husky Harris before he developed a can’t-miss persona in Bray Wyatt. Ultimately, the group was retired as Punk found major notoriety in 2011 with his Summer of Punk angle.
5 No Limit Soldiers: Being In WCW
One could view WCW as being weirdly ahead of the curve when it came to including hip-hop in pro wrestling, considering PN News in the early 1990s and the formation of an entire faction centered around Master P’s No Limit Records label in 1999. The lineup wasn’t great — save the presence of Konnan and Rey Mysterio Jr. — but what really killed this group’s chances was being a rap faction that was feuding with the country music-themed West Texas Rednecks in a promotion whose primary audience was white southern wrasslin’ fans. It also didn’t help that the Rednecks’ song “Rap is Crap” was way too fun.
4 The Union: Injury
Formed after The Corporation’s merger with The Ministry of Darkness, The Union was an opposition faction featuring Mankind, Test, Ken Shamrock, and The Big Show. While the idea of babyfaces literally forming a union to combat corporate evil is a great one, the group didn’t last long.
Unfortunately, injury is what torpedoed The Union’s forward momentum. As soon as the group formed, Mankind had to take time off for knee surgery, so The Union pretty much immediately disbanded.
3 New Breed: The Opposition Was Cooler
Once WWE’s disappointing 2006 revival of ECW got rolling, Elijah Burke organized a group of the new young stars to form a heel faction called the New Breed, seemingly to intentionally oppose the ECW Originals like Rob Van Dam and Tommy Dreamer. While the idea of the upstarts banding together is always a great one (see: The Nexus), the problem with the New Breed was two-fold. Save for a brief fake-out heel turn for CM Punk, the New Breed’s lineup was weak, and — even worse — guys like vampire wrestler Kevin Thorn seemed deeply uncool going up against beloved stars like The Sandman.
2 Beat Down Clan: Timing
In 2015, Impact Wrestling saw the rise of a new faction in the Beat Down Clan. Led by MVP, the group featured Samoa Joe, Kenny King, Low-Ki, and Bobby Lashley among others, making it a proto Hurt Business. One of the group’s big feuds was with Drew Galloway’s faction The Rising, leading to the Beat Down Clan winning match that resulted in The Rising disbanding. Unfortunately, in the wake of their victory, the BDC also disbanded thanks to several members leaving Impact Wrestling in quick succession.
1 Retribution: Presentation
With the end of summer 2020 came the beginning of what appeared to be a huge storyline in WWE, with a mysterious new faction called Retribution staging a hostile takeover of WWE. While Retribution seemed to be an entire army with a vaguely antifa aesthetic, the official reveal of the group couldn’t be more disastrous. The group was revealed to be a bunch of veteran NXT talent repackaged with goofy masks and even goofier names like “T-Bar” and “Slapjack,” and Retribution were so dead on arrival that they immediately became jobbers. Never has a faction flopped so quickly.